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Notes from travels

8/19/2015

 

When you carry a tiny secret red notebook with you wherever you go-


    "The neverseas of...  (her hair, unexplored time, an old age they would not have, etc)"

   NAMES:  T.T., Etta, Sixto Lake, Bird Summerson, Greeley, Blitchridge, Dulsey.  
   DOG'S NAME: BOOZER

   Clownwatch.

   "Hmm.  Might get a little sporty now."  (Riverguide, calmly.)


   The loose, brief charm of a dog rose


   She had a brief, fragile beauty, like one of those girls married too young in colonial times. (wildflower beauty)


   White as electric snow.


   A place called Wet Planet, somebody keeps calling it Wet World.


   Write a story about people who work at a pet store


   A memorized smile (painful, rehearsed)


    "I don't eat sweet with savory, myself."
    ".. you have to eat the voices in your head..."


     "Its so... primitive, that we need to sleep!"

   I could smell the lake's sour basements

   The sour basements of his lungs

   Woman who cuts her mouth with a diamond ring, spits blood at people.  

   Character: flight stewardess

    "Why are you doing this?" (to fatale)
     "I like the attention.  Obv."

   I knew her parents had been married to other people, that their divorces had been more of a spousal swap than anything.  Afterwards the four friends continued to live on as before, in the same apartment complex.  Anyway, it had given Nura a kind of fixed coolness; she was a dyed in the wool cynic.

    "Ah, that's where assholes come from- hangovers."
    "Look, I'm making sure people have jobs, ok?"

   And if she hadn't closed the door in precisely that same way, would all that summer have been different? Or is each of us- is everything- put together in such a way as to be drawn ceaselessly in one inexorable direction, like leaves and bottle caps sucking towards a storm drain-?

   Snapped her dreams as easily, thoughtlessly, as a spider's filaments

   A mosquito prickled my leg

   He had a venipuncturist's mouth, sharp-toothed & pursed, and a nightmare image of a correspondingly needle-nosed dick sprang up in my mind (during convo/cobra img later)

     "Did you know there was this ancient tribe that used to, like, smooth their heads so that their eyes bulged out, like this, for better peripheral vision?"

     "Where do you get your ideas?"
     "I don't know, man, think I just love dramatic shit."

 Pleasantly unreal...

      "Everything is niche now," she said, assuredly.  A grinning woman with a golden grill had just sauntered past, and she was thinking to herself about how many kinds of beauty there were, how many kinds of beholders.  
       "You know whats funny about that," he said, still texting, "Its always been.  We just didn't realize it- there never was a dominant paradigm, just a bunch of disparate niches, all trying to hide themselves under it.  Like kids hiding under a table.  Nobody wants to be the one who gets whipped first."

        "Alex Perez, or the driver of a 2008 Isuzu Rodeo, please return to the cell phone waiting area, where your car has been abandoned, to meet with law enforcement.  Or your car will be towed."

   Bums laughed hysterically.

(fragment after painful dialogue) The grubby bacon fat of the soul, sizzling away.

   It was a humid, petaled dream: she felt it all through her, an opening of her senses, as if she were being stepped through, tasted; a round, warm bee lightly wandering into the fingertip doorway of her flesh.

   Cat sense

   Letting go of the story

   He had a secret fondness for scented soap

   Blank eye socket
   Clocking along
   Supreme grin
   Sunfishing

   He was round shouldered, sway backed, as if nurturing a nonexistent potbelly, a comfortable slouch which had begun as innocent kindergarten defiance... now slowly malforming his spine...

   Raincoat of indifference

   -Maybe words too reductive-  an image driven society, because too complex, evanescent, for words?  Written language comparatively new, unnatural anyway-


   She snailed from the sofa towards the kitchen, still wrapped in and dragging a quilt

   rain-light, sooty

   a deep mirror, satisfyingly unknowable- but which knows you

   as if i were floating in sunstroke

   skinny, fleshless

   “It looks so different from here.” 
   “Everything is perspective, honey.”

this was their game.



    Pauline West

    ​Pauline West's first novel, EVENING’S LAND, is winner of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Award and recipient of the Carol Marie Smith Memorial Scholarship for the NOEPE Center of Literary Arts.  

    West's writing has been shortlisted for The International Aeon Award, and featured in International School Leader Magazine, Reddit’s NoSleep channel, The Art Mag and The Sierra Nevada Review.

    Pauline West's books on Goodreads
    Candlemoth: A Holy City Romance Candlemoth: A Holy City Romance
    reviews: 15
    ratings: 27 (avg rating 4.04)

    Evening's Land Evening's Land
    reviews: 20
    ratings: 24 (avg rating 3.46)

    Candlemoth Volume 2: How To Spend It Candlemoth Volume 2: How To Spend It
    reviews: 7
    ratings: 10 (avg rating 4.40)

    Candlemoth Book 3: A Twist of Fate Candlemoth Book 3: A Twist of Fate
    reviews: 3
    ratings: 6 (avg rating 4.17)

    Stalker: A Gothic Thriller Stalker: A Gothic Thriller
    reviews: 3
    ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.25)

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